The conditions of life in the United States have been most favorable to the growth of a special literature for children, but, with one or two notable exceptions, the literature which is independent of special audiences has had little to do with childhood as a subject, and art has been singularly silent. There is scarcely anything in Irving, for example, which touches upon child life. A sentence now and then in Emerson shows an insight of youth, as when he speaks of the unerring instinct with which a boy tells off in his mind the characters of the company in a room. Bryant has touched the subject more nearly, but chiefly in a half-fantastic way, in his Little People of the Snow and Sella. Thoreau could hardly be expected to concern himself with the young of the human race when he had nearer neighbors and their offspring. Lowell has answered the appeal which the death of children makes to the heart, but aside from his tender elegiac verses has scarcely dwelt on childhood either in prose or verse. Holmes, with his boyishness of temper, has caught occasionally at the ebullition of youthful spirits, as in the humorous figure of young Benjamin Franklin in the Autocrat, and in some of his autobiographic sketches. His School-Boy, also, adds another to those charming memories of youth which have made Cowper, Goldsmith, and Gray known to readers who else would scarcely have been drawn to them; for the one unfailing poetic theme which finds a listener who has passed his youth is the imaginative rendering of that youth.

Whittier, though his crystalline verse flows through the memory of many children, has contributed very little to the portrayal of childhood. His portrait of the Barefoot Boy and his tender recollection In School Days are the only poems which deal directly with the subject, and neither of them is wholly objective. They are a mature man’s reflection of childhood. Snow-Bound rests upon the remembrance of boyish days, but it deals rather with the circumstance of boyhood than with the boy’s thoughts or feelings. Yet the poet shows unmistakably his sense of childhood, although one would not be far wrong who understood him as never separating the spirit of childhood from the human life at any stage. His editorial work in the two volumes, Child-Life in Poetry and Child-Life in Prose, is an indication of his interest in the subject, and he was quick to catch the existence of the sentiment in its association with another poet, whose name is more directly connected with childhood. In his verses, The Poet and the Children, he gave expression to the thought which occurred to many as they considered how soon Longfellow’s death followed upon the spontaneous celebration of his birthday by multitudes of children.

This testimony to Longfellow was scarcely the result of what he had written either for or of children. It was rather a natural tribute to a poet who had made himself a household word in American homes. Children are brought up on poetry to a considerable extent; they are, moreover, under training for the most part by young women, and the pure sentiment which forms the unfailing element of Longfellow’s writings finds in such teachers the readiest response. When one comes to consider the subjects of Longfellow’s poetry, one finds that the number addressed to children, or finding their motive in childhood, is not large. Those of direct address are, To a Child, From my Arm-Chair, Weariness, Children; yet which of these demands or would receive a response from children? Only one, From my Arm-Chair, and that chiefly by the circumstance which called it out, and on which the poet relies for holding the direct attention of children. He gets far away from most children before he has reached the end of his poem To a Child, and in the other two poems we hear only the voice of a man in whom the presence of children awakens thoughts which lie too deep for their tears, though not for his.

Turning aside from those which appeal in form to children, one finds several which, like those last named, are evoked by the sentiment which childhood suggests. Such are The Reaper and the Flowers, Resignation, The Children’s Hour, and A Shadow, all in the minor key except The Children’s Hour; and this poem, perfect as it is in a father’s apprehension, yields only a subtle and half-understood fragrance to a child. One poem partly rests on a man’s thought of his own childhood, My Lost Youth; The Hanging of the Crane contains for its best lines a vignette of infancy; a narrative poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, has for its chief figure a child; and Hiawatha is bright with a sketch of Indian boyhood. The translations show two or three which include this subject.

While, therefore, Longfellow is repeatedly aware of the presence of children, it is not by the poems which spring out of that recognition that he especially reaches them. In his poem From my Arm-Chair, he refers to The Village Blacksmith; that has a single verse in which children figure, but the whole poem will arrest the attention of children far more than From my Arm-Chair, and it belongs to them more. It cannot be too often repeated that books and poems about children are not necessarily for children. The thoughts which the man has of the child often depend wholly upon the fact that he has passed beyond childhood, and looks back upon it; it is impossible for the child to stand by his side. Thus the poem Weariness contains the reflection of a man who anticipates the after life of children; there is nothing in it which belongs to the reflection of childhood itself. Tennyson’s May Queen, which has found its way into most of our anthologies for the young, is a notable example of a large class of verses quite unfit for such a place. It may be said in general that sentiment, when made a part of childhood, is very sure to be morbid and unnatural. We have a sentiment which rises at the sight of childhood, but children themselves have none of it; the more refined it is, the more unfit it is to go into their books.

Here is a collection of poetry for children, having all the marks of a sound and reputable work. As I turn its leaves, I come upon a long ballad of The Dying Child, Longfellow’s The Reaper and the Flowers, a poem called The Little Girl’s Lament, in which a child asks, “Is heaven a long way off, mother?” and for two or three pages dwells upon a child’s pain at the loss of her father; Tennyson’s May Queen, who is so unconscionably long a time dying; Mrs. Hemans’s imitation of Mignon’s song in a poem called The Better Land; and a poem by Dora Greenwell which I must regard as the most admirable example of what a poem for a child should not be. It is entitled A Story by the Fire, and begins,—

Thereupon the child declares that it will put the rosebud in a glass, and wait eagerly for the friend to come. So the night goes and the morning comes, and the child sleeps.

Here is a fantastic conception, extremely puzzling to a healthy-minded child. Imagine the natural questions of a simple, ingenuous boy or girl upon hearing this read. Who is this other child? Why was he coming back when the rose was blown? You explain, as well as you are able, that it was a phantom of death; or, if that seems too pallid, you try to imagine that the poet meant Jesus Christ or an angel by this other little child: but, in whatever way you explain it, you are obliged, if you will satisfy the downright little inquirer, to say plainly, This little boy died, and you begin to wish with all your heart that the poet with all her ed rhymes had added dead. Then the puzzle begins over again to connect the blooming rose and the little playmate with death. Do you say that you will leave the delicate suggestion of the lines to find its way into the child’s mind, and be the interpreter of the poem? This is what one might plead in Wordsworth’s We are Seven, for instance. The comparison suggested by the two poems is a partial answer. Wordsworth’s poem is a plain, objective narrative, which a child might hear and enjoy with scarcely a notion of what was implied in it, returning afterward to the deep, underlying sense. This poem of Dora Greenwell’s has no real objective character; the incident of the walk in the forest is of the most shadowy sort, and is used for its subtlety. I object to subtlety in literature for children. We have a right to demand that there shall be a clear outward sense, whatever may be the deeper meaning to older people. Hans Andersen’s story of The Ugly Duckling is a consummate example of a narrative which is enjoyable by the most matter-of-fact child, and yet recalls to the older reader a life’s history.

I have been led into a long digression through the natural correlation which exists between childhood in literature and a literature for children. Let me get back to my main topic by a similar path. The one author in America whose works yield the most fruitful examples in illustration of our subject is Hawthorne, and at the same time he is the most masterly of all our authors who have aimed at writing for an audience of children. Whatever may become of the great mass of books for young people published in America during the past fifty years,—and most of it is already crumbling in memory,—it requires no heroism to predict an immortality of fame for the little books which Hawthorne wrote with so much good nature and evident pleasure, Grandfather’s Chair and the Wonder Book, with its companion, Tanglewood Tales. Mr. Parkman has given a new reading in the minds of many people to the troubles in Acadia, but he has not disturbed the vitality of Evangeline; one may add footnote after footnote to modify or correct the statements in The Courtship of Miles Standish, but the poem will continue to be accepted as a picture of Pilgrim times. So the researches of antiquarians, with more material at their command than Hawthorne enjoyed, may lead them to different conclusions from those which he reached in his sketches of early New England history, but they cannot destroy that charm in the rendering which makes the book a classic.

More notable still is Hawthorne’s version of Greek myths. Probably he had no further authority for the stories than Lemprière. He only added the touch of his own genius. Only! and the old rods blossomed with a new variety of fruit and flower. It is easily said that Hawthorne Yankeeized the stories, that he used the Greek stones for constructing a Gothic building, but this is academic criticism. He really succeeded in naturalizing the Greek myths in American soil, and all the labors of all the Coxes will not succeed in supplanting them. Moreover, I venture to think that Hawthorne’s fame is more firmly fixed by means of the Wonder Book. The presence of an audience of children had a singular power over him. I do not care for the embroidery of actual child life which he has devised for these tales; it is scarcely more than a fashion, and already strikes one as quaint and out of date. But I cannot read the tales themselves without being aware that Hawthorne was breathing one air when he was writing them and another when he was at work on his romances. He illustrates in a delicate and subtle manner the line of Juvenal which bids the old remember the respect due to the young. Juvenal uses it to shame men into decorum; but just as any sensitive person will restrain himself in expression before children, so Hawthorne appears to have restrained his thought in their silent presence,—to have done this, and also to have admitted into it the sunshine which their presence brought. With what bright and joyous playfulness he repeats the old stories, and with what a paternal air he makes the tales yield their morsels of wisdom! There is no opening of dark passages, no peering into recesses, but a happy, generous spirit reigns throughout.

All this could have been predicated from the delightful glimpses which we now have of Hawthorne’s relations to his children, glimpses which his Note-Books, indeed, had already afforded, and which were not wanting also in his finished work. Nor was this interest in childhood something which sprang up after he had children of his own. In that lonely period of his young manhood, when he held converse only with himself, his Note-Books attest how his observation took in the young and his fancy played about them. As early as 1836 he makes a note: “To picture a child’s (one of four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s day,—his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a whipping, etc.” Again, how delicate is the hint conveyed in a passage describing one of his solitary walks! “Another time I came suddenly on a small Canadian boy, who was in a hollow place among the ruined logs of an old causeway, picking raspberries,—lonely among bushes and gorges, far up the wild valley; and the lonelier seemed the little boy for the bright sunshine, that showed no one else in a wide space of view except him and me.” He has elsewhere a quick picture of a boy running at full speed; a wistful look at a sleeping infant, which somehow touches one almost as if one had seen a sketch for a Madonna; and then this passage, significant of the working of his mind,—he is noting a Mediterranean boy from Malaga whom he saw on the wharf: “I must remember this little boy, and perhaps I may make something more beautiful of him than these rough and imperfect touches would promise.”

The relation which Hawthorne held to his own children, as illustrated both in the memoirs of him and in his Note-Books, was unquestionably a sign of that profound humanity which was the deep spring of his writings. But it was not, as some seem to think, a selfish love which he bore for them; he could show to them, because the relation was one of the elemental things in nature, a fullness of feeling which found expression otherwise only as all his nature found outlet,—in spiritual communion with mankind. How deep this inherent love of childhood lay is instanced in that passage in Our Old Home which one reads as it were with uncovered head. It is in the chapter entitled Some Glimpses of English Poverty, and relates how one of the party visiting an almshouse—Hawthorne himself, as his wife has since told us—was unexpectedly and most unwillingly made the object of demonstrative attention on the part of a poor, scrofulous, repulsive waif of humanity. Nothing that he had done had attracted the child,—only what he was; and so, moved by compassion, this strange, shy man took the child in his arms and kissed it. Let any one read the entire passage, note the mingled emotions which play about the scene like a bit of iridescent glass, and dare to speak of Hawthorne again except with reverence.

In the same chapter occurs that delicious little description of children playing in the street, where the watchfulness of the older children over the younger is noted, and a small brother, who is hovering about his sister, is gravely noted as “working a kind of miracle to transport her from one dust heap to another.” He makes the reflection, “Beholding such works of love and duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so impossible after all for these neglected children to find a path through the squalor and evil of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven.”

One of the earliest and most ambitious of his short tales, The Gentle Boy, gathers into itself the whole history of a pathetic childhood, and there seems to have been an intention to produce in Ilbrahim precisely those features which mark the childish martyr and confessor. Again, among the Twice-Told Tales is the winning sketch of Little Annie’s Ramble, valuable most of all for its unconscious testimony to the abiding sense of companionship which Hawthorne found with children. In Edward Fane’s Rosebud, also, is a passage referring to the death of a child, which is the only approach to the morbid in connection with childhood that I recall in Hawthorne. Little Daffydowndilly, a quaint apologue, has by virtue of its unquestionable fitness found its way into all reading-books for the young.

The story, however, which all would select as most expressive of Hawthorne’s sympathy with childhood is The Snow Image. In that the half-conventional figures which served to introduce the stories in the Wonder Book have passed, by a very slight transformation, into quaint impersonations. They have the outward likeness of boys and girls, but, by the alchemy which Hawthorne used chiefly upon men and women, they are made to have ingenuous and artless converse with a being of other than flesh and blood. It is the charm of this exquisite tale that the children create the object in which they believe so implicitly. Would it be straining a point too far to say that as Andersen managed, whether consciously or not, to write his own spiritual biography in his tale of The Ugly Duckling, so Hawthorne in The Snow Image saw himself as in a glass? At any rate, we can ourselves see him reflected in those childish figures, absorbed in the creation out of the cold snow of a sprite which cannot without peril come too near the warm life of the common world, regarded with half-pitying love and belief by one, good-naturedly scorned by crasser man.

In his romances children play no unimportant part. It is Ned Higgins’s cent which does the mischief with Hepzibah, in The House of the Seven Gables, transforming her from a shrinking gentlewoman into an ignoble shopkeeper; and thus it becomes only right and proper that Ned Higgins’s portrait should be drawn at full length with a gravity and seriousness which would not be wasted on a grown man like Dixey. In The Scarlet Letter one might almost call Pearl the central figure. Certainly, as she flashes in and out of the sombre shadows, she contrives to touch with light one character after another, revealing, interpreting, compelling. In the deeper lines one reads how this child concentrates in herself the dread consequences of sin. The Puritan, uttering the wrath of God descending from the fathers to the children, never spoke in more searching accents than Hawthorne in the person of Pearl. “The child,” he says, “could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder.” When one stops to think of The Scarlet Letter without Pearl, he discovers suddenly how vital the child is to the story. The scene in the woods, that moving passage where Pearl compels her mother to replace the scarlet A, and all the capricious behavior toward the minister show how much value Hawthorne placed on this figure in his drama: and when the climax is reached, and Hester, Arthur, and Pearl stand together on the scaffold, the supreme moment may fairly be said to be that commemorated in the words, “Pearl kissed his lips.”

It is noteworthy, also, that when Hawthorne was struggling with fate, and, with the consciousness of death stealing over him, made ineffectual efforts to embody his profoundest thoughts of life and immortality, he should have expended his chief art in loving characterization of Pansie, in the Dolliver Romance. Whatever might have come of this last effort, could fate have been conquered, I for one am profoundly grateful that the two figures of grandsire and grandchild stand thus fully wrought, to guard the gateway of Hawthorne’s passage out of life.

The advent of the child in literature at the close of the last century was characterized, as I have pointed out, by a recognition of personality in childhood as distinct from relationship. The child as one of the family had always been recognized, and the child also in its more elemental nature; it was the child as possessed of consciousness, as isolated, as disclosing a nature capable of independent action, thought, and feeling, that now came forward into the world’s view, and was added to the stock of the world’s literature, philosophy, and art.

“The real virtues of one age,” says Mozley, “become the spurious ones of the next,” and it is hardly strange that the abnormal development of this treatment of childhood should be most apparent in the United States, where individualism has had freest play. The discovery appears to have been made here that the child is not merely a person, but a very free and independent person indeed. The sixteenth amendment to the constitution reads, “The rights and caprices of children in the United States shall not be denied or abridged on account of age, sex, or formal condition of tutelage,” and this amendment has been recognized in literature, as in life, while waiting its legal adoption. It has been recognized by the silence of great literature, or by the kind of mention which it has there received. I am speaking of the literature which is now current rather than of that which we agree to regard as standard American literature; yet even in that I think our study shows the sign of what was to be. The only picture of childhood in the poets drawn from real life is that of the country boy, while all the other references are to an ideal conception. Hawthorne, in his isolation, wrote of a world which was reconstructed out of elemental material, and his insight as well as his marvelous sympathy with childhood precluded him from using diseased forms. But since the day of these men, the literature which is most representative of national life has been singularly devoid of reference to childhood. One notable exception emphasizes this silence. Our keenest social satirist has not spared the children. They are found in company with the young American girl, and we feel the sting of the lash which falls upon them.

Again the silence of art is noticeable. There was so little art contemporaneous with our greater literature, and the best of that was so closely confined to landscape, that it is all the more observable how meagre is the show in our picture galleries of any history of childhood. Now and then a portrait appears, the child usually of the artist’s patron, but there is little sign that artists seek in the life of children for subjects upon which to expend thought and power. They are not drawn to them, apparently, except when they appear in some foreign guise as beggars, where the picturesqueness of attire offers the chief motive.

In illustration of this, I may be pardoned if I mention my own experience when conducting, a few years ago, an illustrated magazine for young people. I did my best to obtain pictures of child life from painters who were not merely professional book-illustrators, and the only two that I succeeded in securing were one by Mr. Lambdin, and Mr. La Farge’s design accompanying Browning’s poem of The Pied Piper. On the lower ground of illustrations of text, it was only now and then that I was able to obtain any simple, unaffected design, showing an understanding of a child’s figure and face. It was commonly a young woman who was most successful, and what her work gained in genuineness it was apt to lose in correctness of drawing.

I shall be told that matters have improved since then, and shall be pointed to the current magazines of the same grade as the Riverside. I am quite willing to concede that the demand for work of this kind has had the effect of stimulating designers, but I maintain that the best illustrations in these magazines are not those which directly represent children. And when I say children, I mean those in whom consciousness is developed, not infants and toddlers, who are often represented with as much cleverness as other small animals and pets. It is more to the point that, while the introduction of processes and the substitution of photography for direct drawing on the wood have greatly enlarged the field from which wood-cuts may be drawn, there is little, if any, increase in the number of strong designs illustrative of childhood. Formerly the painter was deterred from contributing designs by the slight mechanical difficulties of drawing on boxwood. Unless he was in the way of such work, he disliked laying his brush down and taking up the pencil. Now everything is done for him, and his painting is translated by the engraver without the necessity of any help from him. Yet how rarely, with the magazines at hand to use his paintings, does the painter voluntarily seek such subjects!

But if there is silence or scorn in great literature, there is plenty of expression in that minor literature which has sprung up, apparently, in the interest of childhood. It is here, in the books for young people, that one may discover the most flagrant illustration of that spurious individuality in childhood which I have maintained to be conspicuous in our country. Any one who has been compelled to make the acquaintance of this literature must have observed how very little parents and guardians figure in it, and how completely children are separated from their elders. The most popular books for the young are those which represent boys and girls as seeking their fortune, working out their own schemes, driving railway trains and steamboats it may be, managing farms, or engaged in adventures which elicit all their uncommon heroism. The same tendency is exhibited in less exaggerated form: children in the schoolroom, or at play, forming clubs amongst themselves, having their own views upon all conceivable subjects, torturing the English language without rebuke, opening correspondence with newspapers and magazines, starting newspapers and magazines of their own, organizing, setting up miniature society,—this is the general spectacle to be observed in books for young people, and the parent or two, now and then visible, is as much in the background as the child was in earlier literature.

All this is more or less a reflection of actual life, and as such has an unconscious value. I would not press its significance too far, but I think it points to a serious defect in our society life. This very ephemeral literature is symptomatic of a condition of things, rather than causative. It has not nearly so much influence on young life as it is itself the natural concomitant of a maladjustment of society, and the corrective will be found only as a healthier social condition is reached. The disintegration of the family, through a feeble sense of the sacredness of marriage, is an evil which is not to be remedied by any specific of law or literature, but so long as it goes on it inevitably affects literature.

I venture to make two modest suggestions toward the solution of these larger problems into the discussion of which our subject has led me. One is for those who are busy with the production of books for young people. Consider if it be not possible to report the activity and comradery of the young in closer and more generous association with the life of their elders. The spectacle of a healthy family life, in which children move freely and joyously, is not so rare as to make models hard to be found, and one would do a great service to young America who should bring back the wise mother and father into juvenile literature.

Again, next to a purified and enriched literature of this sort is a thorough subordination of it. The separation of a class of books for the use of the young specifically is not now to be avoided, but in the thoughtlessness with which it has been accepted as the only literature for the young a great wrong has been inflicted. The lean cattle have devoured the fat. I have great faith in the power of noble literature when brought into simple contact with the child’s mind, always assuming that it is the literature which deals with elemental feeling, thought, and action which is so presented. I think the solution of the problem which vexes us will be found not so much in the writing of good books for children as in the wise choice of those parts of the world’s literature which contain an appeal to the child’s nature and understanding. It is not the books written expressly for children so much as it is the books written out of minds which have not lost their childhood that are to form the body of literature which shall be classic for the young. As Mr. Ruskin rightly says, “The greatest books contain food for all ages, and an intelligent and rightly bred youth or girl ought to enjoy much even in Plato by the time they are fifteen or sixteen.”

It may fairly be asked how we shall persuade children to read classic literature. It is a partial answer to say, Read it to them yourself. If we would only consider the subtle strengthening of ties which comes from two people reading the same book together, breathing at once its breath, and each giving the other unconsciously his interpretation of it, it would be seen how in this simple habit of reading aloud lies a power too fine for analysis, yet stronger than iron in welding souls together. To my thinking there is no academy on earth equal to that found in many homes of a mother reading to her child.

There is, however, a vast organization inclusive of childhood to which we may justly commit the task of familiarizing children with great literature, and of giving them a distaste for ignoble books. There is no other time of life than that embraced by the common-school course so fit for introduction to the highest, finest literature of the world. Our schools are too much given over to the acquisition of knowledge. What they need is to recognize the power which lies in enlightenment. In the susceptible period of youth we must introduce through the medium of literature the light which will give the eye the precious power of seeing. But look at the apparatus now in use. Look at the reading-books which are given to children in the mechanical system of grading. Is this feast of scraps really the best we can offer for the intellectual and spiritual nourishment of the young? What do these books teach the child of reading? They supply him with the power to read print at sight, to pronounce accurately the several words that meet the eye, and to know the time value of the several marks of punctuation; but they no more make readers of children than an accordeon supplies one with the power to appreciate and enjoy a sonata of Beethoven.

I do not object to intelligent drill, but I maintain that in our schools it bears little or no relation to the actual use of the power of reading. The best of the education of children is not their ability to take up the daily newspaper or the monthly magazine after they leave school, but their interest in good literature and their power to read it with apprehension if not comprehension. This can be taught in school. Not only so, it ought to be taught, for unless the child’s mind is plainly set in this direction, it is very unlikely that he will find the way for himself. I look, therefore, with the greatest interest upon that movement in our public schools which tends to bring the great literature before children.

The study of childhood in literature has led insensibly to observations on literature for children. The two subjects are not far apart, for both testify to the same fact, that in the growth of human life there has been an irregular but positive advance, and a profounder perception of the rights and duties involved in personality.

What may lie in the future I will not venture to predict, but it is quite safe to say that the form in which childhood is presented will still depend upon the sympathy of imaginative writers with the ideal of childhood, and that the form of literature for children will be determined by the greater or less care with which society guards the sanctity of childish life.